


A Long Way from Home

by angstics



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: 3x05 rewrite, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon Divergent, Episode: s03e05 A Life in the Day, M/M, Season 3, but that may change if i decide to make this into a chapter-fic, until they visit the mosaic a few days later, where q and eliot dont remember their life in fillory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-08 12:04:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18622951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angstics/pseuds/angstics
Summary: Memories of the mosaic, of their home, of their family remained in the fibres of the paper a 50-year-old Quentin had bought one day in the market while looking for an anniversary gift for Eliot, and the fruit a grey and cracked and happy Eliot had picked with his growing grandchildren.OR: Quentin and Eliot remember their lives from before when they encounter their quilts buried next to a run down cottage in a familiar corner of Fillory.





	A Long Way from Home

**Author's Note:**

> Most of this doesn't really follow canon. The tile didn't melt into the ground, Eliot is forced to leave Margo, and the quest for the time key doesn't end with Margo showing up before they go into the clock. It's kind of a mess, but I just needed an excuse for Q and Eliot to go back to the mosaic ahah.

“Wait! You bitches looking for these?” Margo said, her voice shaking. Quentin turned, and saw that she was holding two keys in her hand, including the one he held just seconds ago. He looked at his hand, but the second key was gone.

 

He stretched his fingers, recoiling from the lost sensation. “What the hell, Margo?”

 

“Fuck,” She spat back. Margo grabbed Eliot and dragged him back, away from the looming clock. Quentin shook his head, eyes trailing the ceiling.

 

\---

 

The altar still had little dots of brown, glassy blood sprawled on it’s base. The throne room was cleaned so hastily, the splatters remnants of a past no one wanted to address. Eliot's gaze was still stuck on the blood when Quentin left his side. Eliot only felt slightly bothered by the loss.

 

Quentin's movements were strange, as if someone was pulling him with a tight rope. Eliot never saw someone so focused. “Q?” Eliot said warily, speeding to his side. Quentin stopped in front of a gift table, frowning at a basket of fruit with a letter packed in it. Peaches and plums. The basket jumped out from the white-wrapped, expensive-looking, big gifts surrounding it. “What is this?”

 

Quentin’s voice was so quiet when he said: “That’s my handwriting.” Eliot lifted the letter. A simple ‘To Margo’ in curly lettering marked the top.

 

While he read silently, Quentin took a peach and threw it into the air. Eliot’s eyes where becoming bigger and bigger. Quentin chuckled, nervous. “Come on, El. Read it out.”

 

He read the letter aloud, even his mastered apathy unable to mask his shock and awe. Quentin listened carefully. His heart palpitated at a specific line. “Fifty years?” He choked out.

 

Eliot dropped his arms and exclaimed, “Fifty fucking years!”

 

“Wow.” Quentin bit into the peach. It was sweet, but nothing special.

 

Eliot gave him a bewildered smile. Q diverted his eyes. He can’t look at that look without smiling back. “You’re awfully calm about that, Coldwater.”

 

“It’s not like it really happened.” Margo stopped them before it could. Quentin didn’t know what they would’ve done in those fifty years. The letter didn’t really give them any specifics. They were happy. They were devoted to the quest. They lived full lives. But not _they_ they; he and Eliot were still in their present, just halfway into their twenties.

 

“But who solved the mosaic if we didn’t? Who gave the key to Jane?” Eliot waved the letter in the air. “Who wrote this fucking letter? I hate this time travel bullshit.”

 

Quentin wondered what it would’ve been like to know and live with Eliot for fifty years.

 

The letter finished with a short ‘Love, Quentin’. Eliot placed the folded letter on the table to grab a plum. He turned to Quentin twisting his head to face him properly. Lifting the uneaten plum to Quentin’s peach core, he said with a grin, “To the quest. For making this one thing easy for us. This one, single easy thing in the pile of shit we live in everyday.” The corner of his lips twitched, as if shaking in the unfamiliar position.

 

Quentin’s chest tightened. He wouldn’t have minded a happier life with Eliot. “To the quest,” Quentin echoed. Eliot devoured the plum.

 

They threw the remnants of the fruit in the field outside the windows, then left to check on Margo and her homicidal child-bride situation, fervently talking about the next keys for the quest.

 

Memories of the mosaic, of their home, of their family remained in the fibers of the paper a 50-year-old Quentin had bought one day in the market while looking for an anniversary gift for Eliot, and the fruit a grey and cracked and happy Eliot had picked with his growing grandchildren.

 

—

 

“Why are we here again?”

 

“Jane said…” Quentin paused, twisting his hand in the air, “She said that, apparently, the key was unstable. Something about it being outside of time and space for too _long_? Although I don’t how that would work when it wasn’t within time in the Clock Barrens? I me-”

 

Eliot stopped him with a hand pressed on his chest. “Q, focus.” He pat him on the shoulder, then continued walking.

 

Quentin ran a hand through his tangled hair, frowning. Margo came back with the Time key in-tow three days ago. He’d thought that that was that. But with her came this itch. The itch of what could’ve been (what had been?), questions of if he could’ve lived fifty years away from his friends and his world, if he would’ve chosen to live that way if given the choice.

 

And some other times, when he felt especially tired and not in the mood to censor his own thoughts, he would think about living with Eliot without any monsters out to kill them, without blood and pain staining their day-to-day lives. He’d wonder if he’d found someone to love, and if that someone could possibly be Eliot. Did he love Eliot when he was 70 as he did when he was 25? Or had it become more? (Was it always more?) Did he lose Eliot? Was it from his own will or by the hands of death? The thought was bittersweet.

 

“Q, we don’t have time for you to stare lovingly at me,” Eliot joked, pulling Quentin by the hand to his side. “Though I don’t blame you.”

 

Quentin looked at his scraggly face, his tight smirk. “I wasn’t st-”

 

“Of course not,” he rolled his eyes, but his small smile still shined with mischief. “Q, just spill it out. Why did little Ms. Chatwin send us on this… mini-quest when we already have the key?”

 

Hiking up the small hill, Quentin mumbled through the explanation. “You were there when Margo told us. Jane said ‘the key was separated from the channels of the universe’ and that it needed to ‘get a hold on the laws of our space and time by going back where it had once called home’.”

 

“Sounds appropriately vague,” Eliot bemused, helping Quentin from slipping on the wet grass by clasping the man’s hand to his own. Quentin tried to ignore the tickle that sparked when their hands joined. “And how is going back to the mosaic doing that?”

 

“It’s…” Quentin prepared himself for Eliot’s eye roll at what he was to say next, “It’s the key’s home.” But Eliot did nothing but pause and look at the view from atop the hill. Whitespire was large in the distance, and it looked almost Earth-like without the magically-floating spires. Eliot’s gaze was glued to his castle, as if he’d lose it if he took his eyes of.

 

“Like Whitespire is your’s,” Quentin retorted. Eliot rolled his eyes. There it was.

 

Quentin gave him a moment. He looked through the forest beyond them. It looked like any other forest in Fillory; magical even without magic, bright even when engulfed by heavy tree canopies, dandelion seeds floating everywhere you looked. Benedict’s map showed that the mosaic was just up ahead, a 10-minute journey from the hill they were resting on.

 

Eliot sighed. “That fairy bitch just had to put Bambi in more misery. No offense to you, Q — you know I love you — but did this detour really need me?”

 

“The quest chose us,” Quentin shrugged, “We still haven’t really fulfilled it.”

 

Eliot hummed a low tone. He took in the view for a breath, then turned. “Let’s find that mosaic.”

 

—

 

The mosaic was gone.

 

Well, not _gone_ gone. It was covered by moss and shrubbery; so much so they would’ve missed it if it weren’t for the adjacent cottage synonymous with the mosaic. The field looked long-abandoned, as if it was stuck in time. Eliot approached the small house beside the bed of shrubs.

 

He hesitated. Was he allowed to touch something so unscathed by human influence? But it was out of his control; the cottage was pulling him in. He placed a long hand on the green rock.

 

A smile tugged on his lips. It felt like meeting a friend he’d long forgotten. He should know every crack, every corner of the house. He should know what it looked like before it was retaken.

 

“This looks like a squatter joint for hippy anarchists,” Eliot commented, uneasy with the sizzling silence.

 

Quentin chuckled. Eliot wanted to hear it again the moment it passed. “I’m pretty sure that’s what we were,” Quentin said.

 

He was lying on a day bed next to the mosaic. His hair was flushed around the withered frame, his hands behind his head. Q was smiling foolishly, and Eliot had never seen someone look so precious while laying an a mattress that looked like rotten cheese.

 

Eliot could’ve stayed there for hours if Quentin didn’t get up and approach a strange, lone tile in the middle of the mosaic. “This is where they found the key,” he realized.

 

Eliot picked up a tile from one of the stacks and held it against the single tile. The one on the mosaic almost glowed, as if immune to the forces of nature. The other was grey, already chipping in his hand.

 

Eliot’s heart really stopped this time. “It’s magic.” Hands above the shining tile, he could feel the buzz in his fingers. He looked around to make Quentin feel the energy too, but he was already on the other side of the cottage.

 

“El…” Quentin’s voice flattered, as if unable to muster the words to speak. _Was there more magic here?_ Eliot wondered.

 

He crouched next to Quentin, looking at what he was so mesmerized by. It was the tip of a quilt jutting out of the ground. Eliot didn’t know why his blood beat harder. Quentin — unafraid, courageous, curious Quentin — grabbed the quilt and pulled. A chunk of the blanket ripped off. Q fell back from the momentum, but didn’t get up.

 

Eliot pulled him back up. His brown eyes were glassy, and his mouth hung open.

 

“Quentin?”

 

“Oh my god.”

 

“What?”

 

“Fifty years!” He was still staring dazly into the distance, but with a smile that reached his temple.

 

Eliot frowned. “What about it?”

 

Quentin sighed softly. “Jesus, El.”

 

Before Eliot can respond, the other man shoved the quilt into his chest.

 

Eliot sucked in a breath. Flashes of forgotten memories rushed through his head. Magic being back but not really, chalk-stained fingers flipping through a sketchbook, slurping vegetable stew after hours of working on the mosaic, Quentin pushing back his hair as sunlight hit his face at the right angle that made air seem even sweeter, missing Margo so much that it hurt, kissing Q again and again and again, peaches and plums, their 1000th design, tearing up as he saw their newborn Teddy laughing in Arielle’s arms, fights that only made him love his family more, hearing Q’s sobs the night Ari died, skin on skin night after night, telling Ted stories of High Queen Margo and brave Daddy, discovering they’d repeated the same design in their sketchbooks multiple times, his first grey hair, tracing Q’s laugh lines in the middle of the night, watching Whitespire being built year after year until it had looked exactly how he’d found it, watching Teddy marry his lover, weeping when he realized he’d forgotten Margo’s name, lying in their daybed as Quentin entertained him with magic tricks he’d seen a million times and laughs he’d heard even more, being too tired to be useful anymore, watching Quentin work as he drifted off to sleep.

 

Eliot breathed in the blanket, ignoring the dirt and only focusing on the rough texture of the quilt. “Peaches and plums,” he whispered.

 

He laid back. Quentin was already resting atop the grass. “Peaches and plums,” Quentin agreed, barely audible. “It was sort of beautiful.”

 

“It really was.”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this. Comments, Kudos, Bookmarks are all very appreciated!!
> 
> Also: The ending is very ambiguous, so I think I /may/ continue this in another chapter.
> 
> @angstics on tumblr | @braveque tm sideblog on tumblr


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